From Ben Falk, CleaningTheGlass [Thread]
Something to consider if you aren’t as familiar with how the free agency news gathering game is played, in response to a tweet about teams interested in a player:
> When I worked for teams, it was amazing how often some news like this would pop up about your own team—and you weren’t even remotely interested in the player. You’d read it and go: huh? Where did that come from?
> The answer, as I learned, is that it almost always comes from the player's agent.
> Agents call around or meet in person with executives and ask if the team has interest in their clients and at about what number.
> The agent compiles a list of teams with interest. And then, of course, they want to tell the market that lots of teams have interest in their player and therefore should bid higher, so they leak it.
> Here's the catch: the agent's incentive is to make that list as impressive as possible.
> So these lists that float around are some combination of truth and lie (perhaps even 100% lie?). Again, I saw multiple times where my team had never registered interest but we were mentioned.
> So if your favorite team is listed in a tweet like this, there's a chance they like the player. But also a chance they only have minimal interest and mentioned it in passing, and a chance they don't have any interest at all.
> The lesson, as always: when you see news from anonymous sources, don't take it as fact. Your first reaction should be to ask:
> (1) Who has the incentive to leak this?
> (2) Does that incentive make them more likely to tell the truth or to lie?
https://twitter.com/bencfalk/status/1145380161766006785?s=21
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That is the conclusion I’ve come to, Things Ben doesn’t know about:
Developmental history of Camera technology,
Animal Farm,
How to obey the rules,
Being short
